A Distinction Between SF and Fantasy
John Clute on SF and fantasy (and other goodies):
A very simple distinction is that SF is a set of stories which are arguably possible, in terms of our understanding of science, human history and human nature; and that fantasy is a set of stories which are not arguably possible. Between SF and the world, there is a cognitive continuity; between fantasy and the world, there is not. This is not to say that the sense of Story which lies at the heart of fantasy cannot lead to something we might call Truth. SF takes the shape of the world, upon which it extrapolates. Fantasy (pretentiously, perhaps) takes the shape of the human Story (which one may call the soul), which it tries to recognize.
Recognition is, in fact, central to my underlying sense of the structure of fantasy (it’s a far better term for what I mean than “knot,” the term I used in a Locus interview about the same central movement of the fantasy text). The moment of Recognition is the moment when (for instance) the characters in a fantasy recognize the Story they are in, or the memories they have suppressed, or the true nature of the Land which they must redeem. Recognition looks backward into the underlying truth. In this sense, it is a fairly precise analogue (and contrast) to Conceptual Breakthrough, a phrase Peter Nicholls generated in the 1970s to describe the central movement of the SF text: into a new, larger, better-understood world.